Author: Ada Hoffmann

Posted on

On hope and voices

The world feels like it’s on fire. I’m not even in the places worst affected. I have been sitting here in Canada like a chump this week, watching helplessly while all my American friends panic. (Which is not to say that a sufficiently terrible American president cannot affect the entire world. But I am not in the epicentre.)

Hyperempathy is a thing. I have been very overwhelmed. I have wanted to say something, and I have said many things privately, but I have been publicly silent because everything is terrible and what the hell can I possibly say that will make any difference?

But – hiding and focusing on friends and self-care tends to have an effect. Namely, that after you do it for long enough, you are ready to come out again.

Here is what I want to say.

Please, please, if you are reading this and you are marginalized and terrified for the future, don’t give up hope. I am not here to tell you “it’s not so bad”. But when things ARE very bad, when the future is in doubt, that is when we need hope the most. That is when nothing but hope will sustain us.

Please, if you are reading this and you are marginalized and afraid, please remember that your voice matters. It always has. It always will. It matters in some ways now more than ever.

(Some people are going to be worse affected by the next four years than others, but I am not here today to split hairs about who is and isn’t marginalized enough. If you feel you need this post today then this post is for you.)

It is hard to believe in your voice when the whole world is shouting that you don’t matter, that people like you don’t matter, that your safety and self-advocacy doesn’t matter, that the whole nation already decided against your existence mattering, that you should go away.

It is so fucking hard. But your voice matters.

There are so many ways we can use our voices. There is no one way. All of them matter. Protest and political action is important. (Politics doesn’t stop happening just because the election is over.) Supporting each other is so, so important. Standing up for ourselves is important. Any way at all that we stay connected and believing in each other is important right now. If all you can do is tell bad jokes, as Ursula Vernon brilliantly said on Saturday, even that is important right now.

And art. Art. Please, if you are reading this, keep believing in your art, in your stories or paintings or songs or whatever it is that you do.

I and so many people I know have been struggling with art this week. Wondering how we can keep faffing about with fantasy worlds when the real one is on fire. (Other people I know have lit a flame in themselves, have doubled down and made their work bigger and louder and more defiant because they already know why their work matters now more than ever. If this is where you are right now, I support you.)

But the truth is. Art matters. Art has always mattered. If your art is defiant and angry and shines a light on injustice too bright to ignore, we need your art right now. If your art is full of hope or even happy fluffy escapism, if your art gives frightened people a way to imagine being okay, we need your art really badly right now. If you are marginalized and your art is anything at all, then we need your art. In the face of powerful people who believe that you don’t matter and should go away, all art that you make is defiance and all of it is powerful.

And if you can’t do any of this right now? If you are too overwhelmed, if you can’t speak out, if you can’t art, if you can’t anything?

You are still okay.

Please. Please believe this. Terrible things are happening everywhere all at once and so much is needed. It’s still okay to take care of yourself. It’s still okay to hide and heal. It’s tempting to say “so that you survive to fight another day” – but, you know what, honestly, fuck talking like that right now. You matter. You matter. That is the whole fucking point of all this. We are all trying to speak out now because we know that marginalized people matter. The mattering comes before the activism, not after. If you are too ill, too terrified, too in danger to do anything that feels like it makes a lick of difference for anyone else – you still matter. You are still okay. Believe me.

(Jill S. has a very good post on self-care, in this vein. I recommend it.)

Put on your oxygen mask first. If that’s all you can do, do it, and you have saved one person. You’re okay.

Even when things feel so urgent, even when they are urgent – let’s be real. It is going to take four full years to survive the next four years. There is literally no way around that. There will be time for everybody to contribute and there will be times when even the most spoonful of us need a rest. If you are struggling, take your time, do what you need to do for yourself, ask for the help that you need, because you matter.

Your voice will still matter when you are ready to come back out.

Posted on

The Giantess’s Dream

Cover of Twisted Moon, Issue 1

As promised, here I am today posting about my new poem!

“The Giantess’s Dream” came to me, very nearly fully formed, on Halloween night of 2012. I had no idea what to do with it. It was… a sexually explicit poem about Loki. (The mythical Norse Loki, not the Marvel Loki, although I am totes not in charge of what you picture in your head when you read it!) Who the heck was going to publish this? I sent it around fitfully anyway, because I liked the poem, but I did not really feel that it was a good fit anywhere, so I ended up reluctantly putting it aside.

Then I found out on Twitter that someone was making a new magazine devoted specifically to erotic speculative poetry. SCORE!

Apparently, several other very good speculative poets had similar sexy things stuffed in their closets somewhere that they similarly didn’t know what to do with. Because Issue 1 of Twisted Moon is now out. It’s gorgeous visually and verbally and features delightfully naughty work by Neile Graham, Sonya Taaffe, Mat Joiner, and other speculative poetry luminaries.

You can read the whole issue here. Or, if I had you at “a sexually explicit poem about Loki”, you can skip straight to my poem here.

(The words of the poems are NSFW, obviously, though the visuals and art that I can see on the site right now are very spare and tasteful.)

(If you are in my immediate family and read this, I don’t want to know.)

Posted on

Updates and sales

I’ve been continuing to sell things these past few months, which is gratifying.

My short story “A Spell to Retrieve Your Lover From the Bottom of the Sea” will appear in Strange Horizons next week. This is my first short story sale in quite a while, hopefully with many more to follow.

Another short story, “As Hollow as a Heart”, will appear in the December issue of LampLight. This story is about Lady Blue, the gender-flipped Bluebeard protagonist of “Lady Blue and the Lampreys”, but may or may not actually take place in the same universe at that story. More on that later.

For poems, I’ve sold “The Giantess’s Dream” to the very first issue of the erotic speculative poetry magazine Twisted Moon, which is coming out tomorrow – eep! I guess you’ll get another post tomorrow. Another much shorter poem, “Unicorns”, will appear in a future issue of Liminality.

Finally, a few updates on works that are already in the wild. I neglected to mention that earlier this month, “Million-Year Elegies: Edmontonia” went up on the Mythic Delirium website and is now free to read. And the HWA 2014 Poetry Showcase, which features my poem “Evianna Talirr Builds a Portal On Commission”, is now out in paperback. Happy reading!

Posted on

Autism News, 2016/10/09

I’ve been so busy that somehow there wasn’t an Autism News post since June. But news has been accruing at an astonishing rate! So we’re going to have a REALLY BIG news post today. Hold on to your hats.

Intersectionality:

  • Lydia Brown on the intersection of autistic and trans experience.
  • A Fusion video on the intersection of race and autism
  • Dani Alexis Ryskamp on emotional labor and autistic women. [I’m really glad to see an article on this topic; I’ve been wondering about autistic people’s experience of emotional labor ever since I was introduced to the concept.]

Science and technology:

Reviews:

Some writing advice:

Some good posts about ableism:

Misc:

Sad things:

We have a doozy of a Sad Things section this time, partly because of a few well-publicized cases of attacks on autistic people in the news. A man named Charles Kinsey was shot by police in the US, who later claimed they had meant to shoot the autistic person Kinsey was caring for. Meanwhile, an autistic man named Abdirahman Abdi was killed by police in Canada. A person in Japan performed a mass shooting in a facility for disabled people, claiming he wanted a future without disabled people in it. An autistic boy named Austin Anderson in the US who was killed by his mother also made the news.

The Charles Kinsey case got enough media attention to merit its own section:

Meanwhile, other sad things:

Posted on

Million-Year Elegies: Oviraptor (and a convention update)

I continue to be completely swamped, mostly by good things!

Can*Con. Um. Can*Con. I somehow went to an entire convention in Ottawa last weekend and forgot to post anything about it. Spoons were in short supply, but it was a lovely convention as always and I enjoyed seeing both familiar and new faces (and a few people I knew, but only from online). I did panels on Mental Health and Character Arc and Bodies of Difference: Disability in Science Fiction, and read “The Mother of All Squid Builds a Library” aloud.

(Side note: This is still my greatest story title ever.)

The Bodies of Difference panel was especially good, with all of us agreeing that we could easily have talked about the topic for another hour. Shout-out to Derek Newman-Stille, who was, as always, an excellent and clueful moderator.

Also, school. Omg school is starting and I completely forget how everything just flies out the window at the beginning of every new semester. I’m taking a class, as well, for the first time in several years, so that’s new.

And!

While I was mostly off the Internet for a few days due to technical issues, my poem “Million-Year Elegies: Oviraptor” went up as part of the Strange Horizons fund drive bonus issue!

The poem is, as @goblinpaladin put it on Twitter, “a great poem about a sad dinosaur fossil”.

Strange Horizons is an amazing magazine. They were my first full-length professional fiction sale, and one of my first poetry sales. They consistently publish interesting work by diverse authors and employ diverse editors also. If you like my poem or anything else they have published, and you can afford to do so and haven’t already, then I would strongly recommend their fund drive as a worthy target for your donations.

Posted on

Million-Year Elegies: Tyrannosaurus

Hot on the heels of my last poetry publication, Uncanny Magazine issue #12 is out, featuring my poem “Million-Year Elegies: Tyrannosaurus.”

This (in late 2014) was the first “Million-Year Elegies” poem I wrote. I already knew it would be part of a series, even though I had no idea yet what the rest of the series would look like. So far, that instinct has proven correct.

It’s available now if you want to buy the whole issue; otherwise, it will be free to read online starting on October 4th.

Posted on

New Poem: Roar

August. August. Where did August go?

It went to some pretty good places. Including Finland for a while, and some big steps careerwise, and a new relationship. I kind of disappeared off the writerly Internet, though, and all sorts of small tasks I’ve been neglecting because of the awesome have piled up. I suppose this is just one of those things that happens at times.

Anyway, here I am, with a new publication in inkscrawl. “Roar”, a tiny poem about a magical rock concert, is here.

Posted on

Autistic Book Party, Episode 26 and a Half: Short Story Smorgasbord!

Gabriela Santiago, “They Jump Through Fires” (Black Candies: Surveillance, April 2015; reprinted in GlitterShip, September 2015)

A horror story about an autistic woman mourning the death of her girlfriend. The protagonist’s grief is described in a way that, to me, feels both distinctively autistic and realistically nuanced. There are sensory aspects, analytical aspects, philosophical aspects, and a strong undercurrent – implied more than explicitly described – of immense confusion and distress. This distress only intensifies as the horror plot progresses and the scene becomes a surreal nightmare: a nightmare which is no less haunting for its mathematical aspects. [Recommended]

*

Lynn Kilmore, “By the Numbers” (Crossed Genres Issue 31: Novelette, July 2015)

A story about a math-obsessed autistic professor who discovers that she can communicate with equally math-obsessed aliens. The story makes a point of including realistic details, such as the protagonist (Mel)’s sensory sensitivities and her anti-cure perspective. It also makes a point of sharing and validating Mel’s experience. That said, a few things about it didn’t work for me. Mel is portrayed as a very disagreeable person (and, frankly, a bad professor) in ways that have little to do with autism, but that could easily be conflated with it by an outsider. I’m not opposed to writing autistic protagonists who are disagreeable, but I don’t think this one is handled well. Additionally, mathematical sequences are thought to be one of the easiest ways for two sentient species to establish communication over a long distance, so it feels like a stretch when the other characters (including a physics professor!) conclude that the aliens must be “annoyingly obsessed” like Mel, rather than performing a logical and necessary first-contact protocol. This one tries, but doesn’t quite hit the mark for me. [YMMV]

*

Bogi Takács, “Skin the Creature” (Through the Gate, Issue 9, December 2015)

[Autistic author] This is a poem about seizing hold of life. While it’s not “about” autism, mentions of flailing movements and sensory intolerance suggest that its vivacity is a neurodivergent vivacity, one unbothered by its own intensity and oddness, unafraid of standing out, and eager for the next experience. [Recommended]

*

Rose Lemberg, “The Desert Glassmaker and the Jeweler of Berevyar” (Uncanny Magazine, Issue Eight, January 2016)

[Autistic author] A light, warm, and rather flowery long-distance love story set in Lemberg’s Birdverse world. I read one of the lead characters, Vadrai, as perhaps on the spectrum. She has anxiety, fear of crowds, preference for solitude, aptitude for work involving tiny details, and admitted lack of understanding of how to deal with people. (I also read both characters as demisexual.) These elements are backgrounded and perhaps debatable, which only makes the story more charming to me: we need more love stories involving (arguably) autistic people in which autism is not presented as a major barrier to the characters’ happiness together. [Recommended]

*

Merc Rustad, “Iron Aria” (Fireside, Issue 34, July 2016)

[Autistic author] I read the protagonist of this story, Kyru, as autistic because of his expressive speech difficulties and sensitivity to noise. Kyru also gets to be the typical bildungsroman-fantasy protagonist, leaving a home where his relatives underappreciate and misgender him, and traveling to a magical mountain where there are problems only Kyru’s abilities can fix. I especially appreciate the way Kyru’s sensory sensitivities and his magical abilities affect each other, without being at all conflated. An ominous but hopeful story in which an autistic trans hero comes into his own. [Recommended]